


completely out of their forgiveness supplies.

by hasitsclaws



Category: From Dusk Till Dawn: The Series
Genre: F/F, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-26
Updated: 2014-10-26
Packaged: 2018-02-22 16:36:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,599
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2514578
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hasitsclaws/pseuds/hasitsclaws
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Now she seeks the darkness out willingly, found a hidden trail to La Reina and followed it straight to trouble.</p><p>“He told you to be smart. Should’ve listened.”</p><p>And the last thing she sees past ripped up monsters and blood is the youngest Gecko smiling at her like he’s just drawn an ace and a ten.</p>
            </blockquote>





	completely out of their forgiveness supplies.

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ohyellowbird](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ohyellowbird/gifts).



> I've had this idea sitting around in a folder for months now, but after talking to ohyellowbird about 'you won't know' by brand new for kate/richie i finally got the inspo to edit and publish. so, here goes, oyb, this is one is for you.

 

* * *

 

She wakes up to bleary lights, flickering shutters, AC kicked up on high so the room feels like the in-between of a desert and the bottom of a deepfreeze.

Glances over to the empty space on his side of the bed, blinks her eyes, because he should be back by now. Even when he goes out and gets shitfaced, can’t put a cap on his emotions, doesn’t want to take it out on her so he takes it out on a bottle of tequila instead, he’s always back by the morning. Sallow faced, heavy eyed, lips curving along the arches of her spine.

“Miss me?” he asks.

She replies with a short and teasing, “You'll never know.”

But he isn’t here to snap at with blunt teeth this time, just her lissome limbs spreading out and soaking up cold sheets, feels like brushing your fingertips over the underside of a bandaid, all crusted up with blood. Looks to the clock, well past noon, a window of time they never break, a secret code, not Morse, exactly, but something more clandestine, a language learned in four years of bleeding onto the lines of each other’s palms.

He’s gone.

 

* * *

 

The car is still in the lot of the only bar in the fuck middle of nowhere town they bunked down at for the night. When she asks, the tender says he paid the tab, walked out the door, never came back. She marks his footprints in the sand, atlas pins, until suddenly they just stop. No pattern, no struggle, no little snake-ink wavers that show where someone may have dragged the body.

Eyes wide open, his sunglasses tipped down her nose, she unlocks the passenger seat and finds a crumpled up piece of paper where her feet always rest on the dashboard. His sloppy handwriting, like a little boy’s who never took proper penmanship seriously enough.

_Some things I need to take care of. Don’t come after me. Be smart,_

–        _S._

There’s two thousand exchange worth of American dollars in the glove department, stuffed there like a plea for forgiveness, a last minute thought, replacement for all the things he’s stolen.

Kate isn’t surprised to hear about the carnage in the town bank on the evening news that night, little antenna television in the corner of the diner blaring static and repulse. She sits over a cup of stale coffee and a platter of rapidly cooling eggs, spreading coagulated ketchup around with a fork in the shape of crosses, the moon, the sun. Looks at the lines of Mexican police tape on screen, bodies on stretchers, crisp white covers all splotchy with red.

Sighing, she pops the lenses out of his sunglasses just to be spiteful.

 

* * *

 

For her eighteenth birthday he got her a charm bracelet full of pins, needles, crosses, sugar skulls and other nondescript, secret things that were purchased by five-finger-discount. Gave it to her in a brown paper bag with a bottle of gin they shared before he pressed her over the hood of a stolen car, knees shaking like a newborn colt with his breath down the back of her neck, quickly skimming south, making her wobble. His mouth sweet between her legs, suddenly, keening sound of her voice when she was still a preacher’s daughter and only knew how to pray instead of take, sticky and wet, trembling, ripe as an unpopped cherry.

"You're my home," he said, after, holding her tight against him, and she banked on the words too much.

When she leaves the motel room that morning she snaps off a hook from the coils around her left wrist, leaves it there in the dirt like a grave marker.

She doesn’t try to find him, or so she tells herself.

 

* * *

 

She hunts at night as is status routine built in the last four years, sleeps like the dead by day. And maybe that would be funny if she weren’t in such a perpetually foul mood, trigger sensitive, looking for a fight no matter where she goes.

There’s always someone or something just violent enough to give her what she wants. Three weeks, two bruised ribs and countless bandages later she ends up trading the car in for an Enduro, teachers herself how to kick, stop, start. And the road feels a little less endless with the wind through her hair, the stars slanting down ugly and harsh on her face.

 

* * *

 

He left just after Dia de los Muertos, skulls and flowers and lost loved ones. Ironic, really, she thinks as New Year’s Eve leaves her feeling hollow and hungry, memories of her momma letting her and Scott stay up until midnight to watch the ball drop, her daddy falling asleep in the big armchair by the front window.

She goes dancing, surrounds herself with masses of body heat and the smell of cheap liquor, heavy base of the music throbbing in her bones like a pulse. Hands flit here and there at her waist but she pushes them off because they’re all callused and big, familiar and not, until, suddenly, tiny little fingers grip at her hips and she turns to see a pair of warm brown eyes in a pretty, heart-shaped face.

“I’m Marisol,” the girl smiles.  

“No one’s asking,” Kate answers, and they dance.

End up going back to Marisol’s place five blocks away to fuck, hands interlocked, all giggles and soft smiles behind Marisol’s big, infatuated eyes, until Kate’s pushing her down on the bed, head between her legs, ravenous and a little cruel. Marisol comes calling out the Lord’s name and Kate wants to laugh, tell her she isn’t going to find God here. Not anymore.

But Marisol returns the favor anyway, all big lips and pretty hands, nails scraping into Kate’s thighs and she lets her head fall back, grits her teeth. It’s nice to feel someone all soft and warm against her instead of hard and hot. Likes the curves of a girl a little more than the lines of a man, fists of luscious curls instead of motel bathroom buzz-clips. Likes the way her toes curl against the covers, sea-shell nail polish getting lost amongst the lavender sheets.

There is no cuddling afterwards, no pillow talk. Kate simply stands and gets dressed, leaves a wad of stolen hundreds on the nightstand.

“I’m not a whore, y’know,” Marisol murmurs, but she doesn’t try to give the money back.

“I know,” Kate answers, and makes sure the door is locked behind her after she leaves.

 

* * *

 

Her twenty-second birthday is spent in silence; he promised to take her back to America for a sneak peak at Winter Wonderlands and soon-to-be Easter cards, all the things they both missed about being north of the border, but he's not here. She goes on a hunt and gets everything right, but when she lays her head down that night, half a bottle of tequila warm in her belly, everything feels wrong.

In the morning she pops aspirin like candy and cleans her guns.

 

* * *

 

 

On a hunt in Taluca she hears news of Santanico Pandemonium.

Snake queen supreme has been off the radar the past two years and three months running, ever since she made a massacre of the southern Midwest States, left a trail of bodies behind her. In the beginning Kate and Seth tried to track her and Richie down, but the trails got tangled, ran around in circles until they were coiled together like a boa.

“Freddie doesn’t have anything, either,” she told him, and his shoulders deflated, bow of his mouth a flatline.

“It’s time to stop,” he said, no room for argument.

She knew he was lying, thought she didn’t, but she _knew_. And that’s why, when she hears about him in Guadalajara, she heads the opposite way.

Things always come to those who aren’t looking too hard, to those who once prayed but can’t find the strength to anymore.

 

* * *

 

She used to get nightmares something awful those first couple of months on the road, rotting flesh of fathers and mothers twisting in with brothers’ fangs, tearing her open, eating her alive. She’d scream herself into consciousness and he would hold her, likes the sound of his own voice but has never known how to use it to comfort. Just _feels_ , presses close, murmurs softly in her ear—

Well, he used to. But this time she wakes up wailing so loud her throat burns, reflex of sobbing, heaving air out her lungs. Clutches at her chest where she thought her heart had been ripped out by greedy Judas hands, finds the flesh intact, steady _thump_ there underneath. Presses her head back down against the pillows, pulls a charm off her bracelet and drops, lets it roll under the bed.

Knows her momma would be disgusted if she could see her right now, would know her daughter was her worst mistake, and Kate wouldn’t blame her.

 

* * *

 

Crystal kaleidoscope colors, hangman’s noose, glass fragments scraping her skin— it all feels the same.

She goes tumbling out the window like a bad batch of laundry, once white sheets down the shoot, wrong-side up as she lands with her face in prairie grass. Hears motion behind her, plays possum and doesn’t move. One wrist fractured, probably, knuckles split and nails cracked, big gouge down her ribs dripping inky red, but she’s got one good hand left and that’s enough.

When the thing goes to kick at her, leans in to sniff for a heartbeat, she turns and cracks her fist into its fangs, dislodging them. It screeches, remaining members of its party fluttering out as she snaps a wooden bullet into their friend’s heart, closes her eyes when dust rains down like a botched baptism.

They try to grab her up by her hair, spit and hiss, copperheads and rattlers and mambas. She kicks and growls and fights, nail and teeth, takes out two more but three find their place. Reasons for a moment it was stupid of her to take on so many at once on her own.

In the beginning, after their night in Hell, monsters used to chase her down like she was some kind of magic chalice, bloodsucking Jason’s Golden Fleece. Something about _light_ and _sacrifice_. They went away for a while after she killed someone, a person with flesh and blood and a family, somewhere. Robbery gone wrong and the man had been pointing a gun at Seth’s head, and Kate hadn’t thought, she’d just fired.

Now she seeks the darkness out willingly, found a hidden trail to _La Reina_ and followed, drops charms from her bracelet at each finished mark. Until today, at least, where she’s so close to getting her guts ripped out like pulling at the ribbon on a prettily wrapped present, white underbelly being scratched into, pain singing, and for a moment she wishes that she still had the capability to get on her knees and beg God forgiveness, absolve, repent. That she would have been a more careful preacher’s baby girl and not lost her faith on deserted Mexican highways, tossed her momma’s cross out the window because it made her think of pills and cars driving too fast, the yellow in her daddy’s eyes before it was nothing but blackness, filling up her insides.

“Seth,” she says when it’s all too much, disorientated from blood loss, thinks he’s going to be there, going to save her like he always does.

“He told you to be smart. Should’ve listened.”

And the last thing she sees past ripped up monster bodies, mangled limbs hanging by chunks, a pulled-out eyeball plopped on her chest, is coke-bottle lenses and wire frames, the youngest Gecko smiling at her like he’s just drawn an ace and a ten.

 

* * *

 

When she wakes up again the light is blinding, not from excess of sun, but bright fluorescents dinging on the bathroom ceiling. She’s draped out in a dirty bathtub, blood all over the walls like a classic Monet, hair matted to her head with sweat.

“Here.”

Casts a lazy glance up, blue ice staring into her soul. “Thanks,” she says, takes the cold washcloth he gives her and presses it into her forehead. “When I feel better, remind me to tear you apart.”

He laughs, sits down on the lip of the tub with a grace she doesn’t remember. In the full twelve hours she spent with Richard Gecko, she couldn’t help but notice what a twitchy little thing he was. Tried to keep his composure, pick his words, hide behind a physical smoke screen, but she’s always been good at perception— saw right through the old Hollywood gimmick to the scared little boy underneath.

But he’s got new skin now, no more bruises or scars. Fangs digging into his bottom lip, not from full-out snake face but simple sharp incisors.

“I don’t think you’ll actually do it,” he says.

“Where’s Santanico?” she answers.

Something flashes across his face, a dark flicker of emotion. “Around.”

She tries to sit up in the bathtub, chokes on her own tongue as pain rises up in her side and she slumps, dead weight and porcelain like a China doll. “I take it you know why he left.”

“He was coming to find me,” Richie says.

“Did he?”

“Not before someone else found him first.”

 

* * *

 

Kate’s never really understood the Twins prophecy. Gets the technicals and everything— two bothers sent into the Underworld to beat the Gods at their own game. Kill the serpent, save the princess, all that fairy tale bullshit. They’d already done part of that, back at the Twister. But somehow it was the other way around, all mangled up in bloody, pulpish coils.

Richie helps her patch her wrist and side up, homemade stitches and too much tequila, and then he makes her _see_ the truth. Thumb to the forehead like he’s making an ash cross, her body jerking back in shock, the recoil kick of shooting a gun for the first time. She blinks her eyes open, shut, and the world drops away.

A beautiful girl covered in blood that she doesn’t want, the moon eclipsing the sun. Sacrifice, hunger, five hundred years in chains. Then there is light, or maybe an absence of. There is salvation, the golden gates stretching open but Peter’s hand is there to press into her chest.

There is no forgiveness here, only revenge.

When the world comes back into focus she’s hanging off the side of a motel mattress that smells like sweat and piss and other foul things, can see a used condom dropped carelessly under the bed and scrunches her nose. Sits up too fast, strands of dust and sunlight spinning through the curtains.

He looks at her from across the room, where he’s sitting at the small table by the window, cigarette hanging out of the side of his mouth like he’s James Dean or something, a black and white movie hero. She knows he’s anything but.

“It’s a little like being hung, huh?” he asks.

“I wouldn’t know,” she replies, mouth cracked, throat thirsty, but not for water. “I’ve never been at the end of a noose.”

“Haven’t you?” he asks, and he’s smirking.

She looks down in shame, hides behind the veil of her hair. “Whatever."

"That girl you slept with," Richie says, open air and Kate feels her insides rumble. "They got her. Never stopped looking for you, Katie-Cakes, just became more discrete."

Something like guilt doubles her over, makes her press her face into the rank comforter, heat flaring up in her chest, regret and tears she will not shed. "I locked the door," she says.

"Locks don't stop monsters," he answers. "Only monsters stop monsters."

"So why aren’t you helping your Goddess, then?” Kate asks, revulsion making her dry-heave, acid burning her throat. She never meant for anyone to get hurt, but she should've known better, should've known that she can't have normal things now, that the night will eat it all up and want more no matter what. "Helping her stop the Lords like she wanted you to?"

“Because they have Seth.”

“The Nine?”

He nods, solemn, blows out smoke and it curls in rings, makes her want to pop the perfect circles because they’re too beautiful for a room full of static. “In order to get him back, I have to kill her.”

“Which is easier said than done?”

“Not entirely.”

“How do you figure?”

“I’ve got something they don’t.”

“…”

He smiles and she feels like she’s missing a puzzle piece, picture photo scraps spread out on the bedroom floor, her and Scott trying to glue the image together so their momma can hang it up on the living room wall with all the others. “I’ve got you,” Richie says, and when she jolts to attention her bracelet catches on the comforter’s loose strings, crosses ripped off.

 

* * *

 

Their birthday rolls around a few weeks later, and she doesn't know why she hasn't left him yet, just that she hasn't.

Comes back from a grocery run to see him sitting on the floor, looking at a small picture that has lines through it from being folded up in his wallet (it reminds her of the one of her family that she stole from the RV before leaving with Seth, the one she has tucked away in her rucksack somewhere). Kate takes in a breath and shuts the door quietly, walking over to look at the crumpled image and seeing two boys smiling with a Hostess treat and candles between them.

"He never let me get him presents," she says.

"We didn't do that," Richie answers. "Instead we stole cupcakes from convenience stores, like it was a game."

"That's all it's ever been for you two, huh? A game." she says.

He looks at her, and not for the first time, she sees a big, bad Gecko scared and vulnerable and it makes her heart twist. "You think I'm going to let you down," he says, reaches over to take her right wrist and rubs at the small tattoo kept like a secret between her radius and ulna, one traced over in white ink, a little  _S.G._  identical to the  _K.F._  on the underside of Seth's own carpals, the one sat opposite of black ink flames. 

"I'm counting on it," she answers, prying her arm out of his grasp.

His eyes slant behind his glasses into yellow snake slits, mouth pulling up in a scowl. "We can do this," he says, determined and fierce.

She shrugs. "You don't know that, not really."

 

* * *

 

 

They go to a temple with and old medicine woman at its heart.

“Pure soul,” she says in a broken language, but somehow Kate seems to understand.

“If you knew all the things I’ve done, you wouldn’t be saying that,” she answers; she thinks of her daddy, of leaving her brother in the dark, fucking the eldest Gecko brother who made her empty promises, the man with the gun she killed for him, Marisol broken and bloody on her warm lavender sheets, teaming up with the prophet son to tear the world apart.

The woman shakes her head, wrinkled face like willow roots, and she’s smiling, all rotted gums and missing teeth. “One cannot kill their purity, they may simply dilute it.”

“What does this have to do with axing off Santanico?” Kate asks, feels like she’s speaking secrets, whispered little girl gossip behind upraised palms.

“Only someone pure of soul may kill another soul corrupted, give them absolution.”

Kate squints, wonders what the catch is. Behind her Richie shifts, has been a permanent wall fixture until now, when his hand is on her shoulder, nails curling into the flesh. “Pray,” he says.

She looks up at him, wide eyes, glass pupils. “You’re asking too much of me.”

The medicine woman laughs. “All he’s asking for is your soul, little one.”

 

* * *

 

There’s a knife or something like it that they have to get.

It’s kept behind laser lines and trigger sensors in an old, stuffy museum. Richie’s specialty. They wait for the exhibit to close for the night, sitting in a sleek black car while he smokes a cigarette and she counts the scars on her fingertips. For a moment she misses the enduro, warm desert wind on her face, and she's mad that Richie wouldn't get off his high horse and ride shotgun behind her, said it was too conspicuous, that a car was better for scoping out.

“You must really love him, to be doing this,” Richie says, and she wants to smack him just because the sound of his voice is annoying right now.

“I don’t love him,” she answers, a lie and a truth all at once. “I owe him.”

“Why? God knows that between me and him, we’ve fucked your life up so much you don’t owe us anything,” Richie says, and his eyes are burning behind his glasses— she wonders why he’s still wearing them, what the façade is for, but she doesn’t ask.

Shakes her head instead, shrinks into the passenger seat like he’s holding a gun to her chest. “He saved my life.”

“So you’ve forgiven him?” And he’s hanging on her every word in that strange way she remembers him doing, like he’s invested and not, too intense, too heightened. She wonders how long he’s been an outsider, if it’s been his entire life or since the fire. She wonders if he’s found where he belongs, figures maybe not because he wouldn’t be here if he had.

Swallowing dryly, she watches as the museum lights turn out before opening her door. “You'll never know.”

He gets out of the car at the same time as her, viper fast reflexes, catches her when she stumbles on concrete. His body is warmer than she would’ve expected, hard lean lines and it makes her close her eyes, the scent of him crisp and evergreen and reeking of nicotine and fresh blood.

“Do you forgive _me_?” he asks.

She shoves him off. “You'll never know.”

 

* * *

 

“I killed my father too. It doesn’t make you a bad person.”

She freezes up where she’s reading a magazine at the end of her motel rented bed, dagger strapped to her hip, lines of Spanish soap star blather blurring together like phosphones. “Seth mentioned that.”

“Did he?”

She nods, glances over at him where he’s sitting erect, close and far away. She wonders how much longer it’ll be before he breaks the lines, before he invades her mind, body and soul like his brother did. It’s just something the Geckos do, she’s realized, and she’s waiting for him to try it, waiting to shove a stake in his chest.

“My father wasn’t a good man,” Richie says.

Kate shrugs. “Mine was.”

“And you killed him.” He isn’t condescending, isn’t mocking or condoning, he’s just stating a fact and she wonders if he realizes that he simply talks at people and not to them.

Sighing, she sits up straight, curls knees into chest. “I did.”

“How did it make you feel?”

“Like I was bleeding,” she answers. “Like a piece of me died with him.”

“Maybe it did.”

 

* * *

 

Sometimes she remembers what it was like to be a naïve, little preacher’s daughter. Church functions and homecoming and student body vice president. Swim and track meets, football games where she held up banners for her first love to win. Bake sales to raise money for new pulpit additives, frosting sticking to her fingertips as she shooed Scott out of the kitchen so he didn’t ruin the cupcakes it took her two hours to bake.

She remembers what it was like to be normal, to put on her boots one at a time and think the worst she had to worry about was grades and sermons and boys. Arguments with her parents about not letting her buy new underwear because they were too revealing, arguments with friends about what the best Sarah Dessen book is. Crying at the sight of blood, rushing someone to the hospital, her mother’s headaches and her daddy’s lies. Looking at geckos and not being repulsed.

When she dreams of these things she always wakes up crying, and, one night, when lean arms wrap around her, constrictor tight, she simply lays there and pretends not to feel him breathing against her neck, the way he’s hard against her ass after a while of endless shifting.

Falls asleep like it’s natural, because, in truth, it is— no matter how hard you try, you can’t deny connection. And connection’s never been sweeter than it is between two souls who have never belonged, even when they liked to pretend they did.

 

* * *

 

They think they’ve got the snake queen on the south side of Rio, march in head-first, glory blazing only to be swarmed by hoards of the undead.

She watches from her corner position behind a glass wall as he tears them all apart for daring to touch her, guts stringy and brains spraying pink matter, pulp of lungs crushed underfoot. Heads ripped off by the neck, teetering like half-cut strings. Limbs pried apart, her eyes caught up, body still until suddenly the glass is breaking and she’s being pushed into the ground.

Fangs at her throat, her hands around its airways, knees and elbows kicking out frantically until she rolls and pins it. Grabs the skull, smashes down, again, again, again, spray of spinal stem and corpus callosum chunks. She’s screaming and she’s crying and she’s begging because _why her_ , _why him_ , _why any of them?_

He pulls her off when it's definitely dead, presses her face into his chest and it feels like coming home the way it did with his brother and she hates herself for all of it, feels like she’s been tied to the stake and burned alive, only to be branded over with new flesh. Silicone and tar and formaldehyde, Stone Man Syndrome in the form of grief and wrong doings.

“You’re a monster,” she says when his hands curve against the base of her skull, cupping, the way a parent holds a baby to keep them from breaking apart.

He smiles, primal, predatory, foul-mouthed. “But I’m your monster,” he says, and she detests the way her heart shivers.

 

* * *

 

“Do you think it’ll ever stop hurting?”

“What?”

“The light inside of me?”

A laugh, razor blades and pin needles to her insides. “You'll never know, sweetheart.”

 

* * *

 

They go to a church because she asks him to.

Lights a candle, kneels at the altar, staring up at the judging savior hung for all their sins.

“What are you praying for?” he asks.

“I can’t tell you,” she says.

“How come?”

“It’s like blowing the candles out on a birthday cake— the moment you say what you wished for, it doesn’t come true.”

“It’s kind of funny,” he says. “You weren’t looking for him, and now you’re here.”

“I _was_ looking for him.”

“You just told yourself you weren’t? Lying to yourself never solves anything, Kate,” he says.

She shakes her head. “I’ve been lying to myself since the moment I stepped out of the Twister.”

“Guess tragedy fucks you up that way.”

“Yeah, but you wouldn't know that, would you?”

His silence is a contradiction that shocks her, makes her look at him and see, not for the first time, a scared little boy looking for direction, something that she cannot give, not anymore.

 

* * *

 

When they get back to the motel room she doesn’t question the way he crowds her space after shutting the door. Breathes out through her nose and whispers psalms under her breath as his hands skim up her sides, pulling her dress up over skin, like a snake molting. A part of her knows she should push him off, stab him in his absentee heart, but another, stronger part of her is rooted still in acceptance, in longing.

When he pulls her gun out of the holster she keeps it in on her thigh, presses it into her hands and says, "Fire, if you want," she still doesn't move. And he breathes out heavy, takes the weapon from her shaking fingers and tosses it on the bed, his mouth trying to catch hers a moment later but she does not let him.

He growls and presses her over the table ass-up like an offering, like that night on her eighteenth birthday only it's a different brother this time when he slithers down between her legs and gets his mouth on her. But she isn’t a preacher’s daughter anymore, knows how to take back-- if Seth taught her one thing, it's that. She wonders if maybe he was preparing her for this moment the entire time.

So she spreads her thighs open wide and stays silent when Richie licks up along her slit, wet and warm and pressing. He sucks at her clit and she doesn’t keen, just makes a sound low in her throat, angry and hungry, trying to lurch up until his hand steadies at the base of her skull, holds her back down.

Still in his suit when he fucks her, cock pulled out, swollen and dripping before he pushes inside and she feels full, split open and it hurts but she’s pressing back into his thrusts, saliva making the table sticky where her mouth is open and she’s panting a damp ring into the surface like she's blowing out Apple Red smoke.

His hands grip into her hips, branding irons she will always have scars from. “What’s it like to be fucked by the devil?” he asks her.

“You won't ever know,” she smiles.

For a moment his hips falter in their steady rhythm, before suddenly he’s pounding into her hard, her entire body bouncing, blood and come slipping down between her legs when he finishes not a minute later, strangled sound of her name gasping out of his mouth and she thinks _oh_ , because this entire time she’s figured she’s a means to an end, but it’s far from that.

Has always been about more than a simple bait and tackle line, more than ancient prophecies and old testaments— she thinks she’s crying when his mouth is back on her cunt moments later, desperate trace of lips and tongue and teeth, when she comes and it feels like nothing other than blasphemy.

“Forgive me yet?” he asks.

She keeps her forehead pressed into the table, cold linoleum surface that feels like emergency room lights. “You won't know,” she repeats.

 

* * *

 

"Do you love her?"

"There was a time when I would've given her anything," he says.

They're sitting by a drained pool smoking a shared cigarette, and when he passes her the filter she bites down, leaves teeth marks like a claim and he smirks at her. "That's the thing about faith," Kate whispers. "It makes you crazy."

"Is that why you gave up?" he asks.

"I didn't  _give up_ ," she says, absentmindedly touching the hollow of her throat where a little gold cross used to sit. "I just..."

"You saw it all for what it really was."

She nods. "Is that what happened for you?"

Again, he smirks, staring at the dwindling charms on her bracelet. "No. I just found someone different to put my bets on. Someone more cruel."

He steals the cigarette back out of her mouth to take the last puff for himself.

 

* * *

 

 

When they find her, it’s in the same place she found them.

She’s sitting in the middle of the stage, stroking her two-headed pet. There is no music this time, however, no lights. She is not made-up, dressed to appeal to mortal men and women’s eyes. She is simply still, but even now she looks ageless, like an oil painting done eons ago and not cracked by time. Kate looks at her in amazement, feels the sudden need to bow and rip this girl-woman-serpent thing apart.

“I hear you’re trying to kill me,” she says.

Richie looks down in shame, like a child being scolded by its mother. “It’s the only way.”

Santanico laughs but the sound holds nothing, dissidence in thick air that smells like sparkly body butter and venom. “I knew it would come down to choosing between me and him. You’ve already given me everything once, Richard. I suppose I cannot expect it a second time.”

“Aren’t you afraid to die?” Kate asks, feels like she’s playing a game of William Tell, her words the apple on the Goddess’ head.

A smile, no red goo stuck to mouth like war paint now, simple chapped lips— Santanico looks so very human in this moment. “No,” she says. “But I am a bit weary of what comes after. Tell me, Kate Fuller, what does your Heaven consist of?”

“Peace,” Kate says, taking a step forwards; there’s a dagger at her hip in the shape of the snake in Richie’s stomach, the one curled around Santanico’s lap. “Eternal salvation.”

“I do not think that would be such a bad thing,” Santanico whispers. “Are there lovers there?”

Kate shakes her head. “The only love you need is God’s.”

“Ah,” Santanico chuckles. “But look how far that has gotten us up to this point.”

A falter in step, Kate shies back, even with Richie behind her, trying to push her forwards. “Peter wouldn’t let you pass.”

“That’s because my kind was kicked out of the garden long ago,” Santanico says. “Yours stayed. Though, you were tempted by the serpent none the same.”

“There’s really no other way for this to end, then,” Kate answers her. “But maybe, now, if you just give in, you can find something good.”

“Like Heaven?”

“Like forgiveness.”

The Goddess smiles, open, bereft, all her sins laid bare at Kate’s feet and for the first time in her life, the once preacher’s daughter tastes the bitterness of being worshipped, of what it means to have a grasp on forever. “Then by all means,” Santanico says, and she does not flinch when Kate presses the dagger into the flesh above her heart. “Absolve me.”

 

* * *

 

He lays with his chest to her back, pressing up inside of her, making her feel whole, filthy and clean, insides melting, cracking open, giving in.

“I can feel your heart,” he whispers.

She pushes back into his embrace, their fingers interlocking over her stomach. “I didn’t think I had one anymore.”

He shakes his head, lips against her cheek. “I forgive you,” he says, and she’s glad that at least one of them has the capacity to do so.

 

* * *

 

When she hangs up the phone, her hands are shaking. "Freddie knows where to find them," she says.

"Glad the Ranger's good for something," he answers coldly, and she realizes he's closing himself off on purpose, trying to hide from her even after a near year's worth of companionship.

Her arms find their way around his shoulders and for a moment he tenses, before suddenly going lax, solid to liquid, grave soil to holy water, leaning back into her embrace. "You said we could do this," she whispers.

"You said I don't know that, not really," he replies, but his mouth is chaste and warm against her exposed tattoo.

 

* * *

 

 

She doesn't sleep like the dead anymore, not in those last few days she has him beside her.

Instead she holds his head in her lap and whispers that it's okay, that she's okay now, and they're gonna be fine, false promises and reassurance. A preacher's daughter is always good at comforting words-- sometimes lies are the only way faith can remain constant.

"Kate?"

"Yeah?"

"Your mom would be proud of you."

 

* * *

 

“When we first met,” she says as they stand at the mouth of an ancient cavern, stream running past their feet and down into blackness, stars hanging overhead, death waiting inside. “You said I was bleeding. That I was hurting. I think you were bleeding, too.”

He slants his gaze crossways at her, and there’s a smirk at the corner of his mouth but it’s swallowed by her lips. This is the first time she has kissed him since the Twister, and she feels like it will be the last time she ever does, too.

“I was,” he says, after, forehead pressed into hers.

“Did you ever find where you belong?”

He tucks a strand of hair behind her ear, plucks his glasses off his face and slides them up the bridge of her nose— the lenses are false but she can suddenly see everything so much more clearly. “You won't know," he smiles, but is sounds a lot like  _yes_.

 

* * *

 

“Richie!”

He grasps her hand in the dark and doesn’t let go, not until he can’t hold on anymore.

 

* * *

 

It’s been nearly a year by the time she sees him again, nearly a year since he left to find his brother even when his brother was busy trying to find him.

They come stumbling out of the mouth of the cavern bloody and bruised, and he’s weighing heavy on her side, a litany of _I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry_ spilling out of his mouth. She nods, holds him up and tries to see through the tears clouding her vision as they fall into dawn, soft ground beneath broken bodies. Her gaze narrows up at the sky, and for a moment she forgets everything that has happened in the last five years. The scars and the pain and the despair eating up her insides.

“It’s okay,” she says like she said to his brother such a short time ago, and when she looks back towards the mouth of the cavern, waiting, he doesn’t come out.

“He’s gone,” Seth sobs, hands across her, steepled like he’s praying, like she’s the altar and he’s the sinner and she can give him absolution the same way she did for a Goddess before shoving shining metal through that forever trapped little girl’s heart, setting them all free.

“Where?” Kate asks, and she’s lilting, everything going dark.

“I don’t know,” Seth says.

 

* * *

 

They realize, only later, patched up and sitting together in the driver and passenger seat like old routine, that it was always part of the deal that one brother dies for another. The princess is sacrificed, the serpents are slayed, the night is bleated out by the dawn.

Kate wonders for a moment if there are telephones on the other side, if he ever would’ve told her he loved her if he’d had the chance. Seth says it every night into her skin, that he’s glad it was her that made it, that he never should have left. That he misses him, that he knows she misses him, too. And she feels empty and full all at once, a picture puzzle torn apart but the pieces are slowly being glued back together again.

“I forgive him,” she says one hazy afternoon, both of them sitting on the hood of the car, looking out over a clear blue ocean.

Seth pauses where he’s slurping on a cup of horchata, looks up at her through the vacant frames of his sunglasses and reaches over to run his fingers across the white ink of _R.G._ branded like a new scar into her left wrist, grasp her radius and ulna in hand, careful and warm. “I think he knows,” Seth says, spinning the chains of her bracelet around and around.

The last charm she has left is a little snake, its crystal blue eyes twinkling in the sunlight; Kate smiles and pushes Richie’s glasses farther up the bridge of her nose.

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> can you tell i was a bit inspired by your 'the ghost who walks' fic at the end there? couldn't help myself.


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